1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains in general to transmission of information over a network and, in particular, to transmission of information between multiple elements in an online commerce system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Merchants routinely offer their products and services to customers via the World Wide Web. Online stores and shopping carts are common and well-known. More recently, merchants have begun using third-party services to implement their online commerce activities. For example, third-parties are used to serve ads to a merchant's web site.
Merchants are continually trying to improve the shopping experience of their online customers. They try to design web sites that are easy to use and that make the online shopping experience pleasant. For example, merchants try to design sites that minimize the number of mouse clicks that a customer needs to complete a purchase.
Conventional web pages are sometimes implemented using Dynamic HTML (DHTML) as a way of minimizing customer clicks. Dynamic HTML loads a web page, along with content that may be displayed when the customer performs certain actions. One problem with DHTML is that all possible display information must be loaded with the web page, whether the information will be used or not. This increases the download time of a page and adversely affects bandwidth. Moreover, DHTML is not appropriate for certain types of applications, such as online commerce, where there are large numbers of options and combinations that a customer could choose. To download a DHTML page covering all possible options for an online commerce application would require an unreasonably large amount of data, possibly even an entire rule base, to be downloaded with the page.
What is needed is a way to improve the usability of online commerce web sites.